End of the Year Audit: Learning From Year 1 to Plan for Success

When Jana Frank opened her Mathnasium* center in Oak Park, Illinois in the fall of 2013, she was confident in her teaching ability, but less so in her business acumen. As the school year carried on, Frank relied on her passion for education and a strong franchise support team to tackle operations and turn her math tutoring center into the established business it is today. By sticking to her strengths and proactively seeking out the resources to fill in the gaps over the course of Year 1, Frank made the transition from being a business owner to running a business.

Frank was drawn to the Mathnasium’s curriculum and procedures and the flexibility it gave her to employ her own methods honed in her time as a classroom teacher. After deciding to sign on with the brand, Frank knew she had a lot of learning to do herself.

“Before you become a business owner, there are these grandiose ideas of what that means and entails,” she said. “But there's support available to you in the franchise system that helped me make the transition.”

Frank said one of her biggest realizations to emerge in her first year of operation was that business ownership isn’t hard when you love what you do. “For me, going from being a teacher to a business owner was daunting,” Frank said. “Running sales and managing adults is very different from managing children.”

By simply investing her passion into her math tutoring center’s day-to-day operations, Frank blossomed as an entrepreneur without even realizing it. She developed programs beyond Mathnasium’s core service offering to 2nd through 8th grade children for kids in preschool, high school and even for adults going back to school to help with math needs across the board.

Frank’s biggest piece of advice for franchisees in the midst of Year 1 is to know thyself. “To be a good business owner, you have to be honest,” she said. “If you're not good at something, hire someone else to do it.”  Frank said that constantly having to consult her accountant while running the books led her to realize the need to hire someone else to handle what was consuming too much of her time.

“You don't have to know how to do everything. Spending some more money to get the right help in the beginning will pay off later,” Frank noted. “It might take a while, but as long as you identify what you can’t do on your own and seek out resources, advice and mentorship during your business’ infancy stage, it will make a difference.”

As a franchisee, this honesty will develop the necessary ability to delegate and outsource responsibility early on, creating time to focus on expanding the business. “During Year 1, the business won't operate if you aren't there, which isn’t sustainable because you can’t be in four places at once,” Frank noted. “It’s hard when you love your business, but the best thing I did for my future growth was letting go and trusting others to run things,” she added.

“What truly makes a good business owner,” Frank said, “is understand people's strengths and putting them in the best role for them. Placing teachers in sales roles doesn't work. Match people with their passions and talents, not what you want, but what their talents actually are,” she advised.

The biggest shift Frank noticed during her first year of operation was the one in herself. “When I first opened my franchise, I felt like a teacher who happened to own the place I taught at. By the time Year 2 began, I was a business owner,” she said. She credits the franchise model with providing her the assistance she needed to make this transformation within herself. Learning from established systems and having a whole network of franchisees to consult, get ideas from and problem solve with made the difference for Frank. “The process is a lot more rewarding not being out there by yourself.”